A. Technical Field
The present invention pertains generally to a grid computing environment, and relates more particularly to parallel processing of service-oriented tasks within a grid computing environment.
B. Background of the Invention
The use of distributed systems for information processing has become commonplace for business enterprises and other organizations, due in part to the rise of the Internet, the World Wide Web, advanced network security, and networking protocols that facilitate network communications. There are many types of distributed systems, ranging from small clusters of identical computing processor nodes occupying one physical location to large global systems that contain many different types of nodes and operating environments.
Developing, deploying, and managing a set of software applications within a distributed system environment become more challenging as the size and complexity of the distributed system environment increases. An approach to meet these challenges is the creation of a grid computing environment (“grid”) from a distributed system. A grid typically is created and managed by installing grid middleware, a set of software components and protocols, onto a distributed system platform. A grid provides a virtual single execution platform having a single set of interfaces to common platform services such as application administration, data access, and security, but it also allows exploitation of the parallelism and fault-tolerance that are inherent in the underlying distributed system environment.
In recent years, the predominant structure of enterprise software applications has been adapted to facilitate the performance and management of enterprise information technologies (IT) within distributed system environments. One such adaptation is a service-oriented structure, in which an application is composed of a set of software components that co-operate to execute an application by providing functionality (“services”) to each other.
A service-oriented grid environment is a grid that hosts a set of service-oriented applications. It would be advantageous for enterprise IT management if the parallelism and fault-tolerance advantages of the grid environment could be leveraged for a deployed service-oriented application without requiring re-design and/or re-implementation of the application components in order to meet the specific requirements of the grid middleware.